Posted by BlackMask on 06/08/09

A short and innacurate history of Statism

There is no such thing as a free-market. Just like other human fabrications such as, "justice", "equality", "peace", and "chaos", the free-market is simply an intellectual construct. We need a word to describe the illimitably complex order of society, and one of the concepts we invented, is the marketplace. Another of these irrelevant intellectual constructs is the state.

When it comes down to it, these things do not exist, except as far as our belief in them causes us to arrange and align ourselves as if they did. Our belief in the state does not make the state occur, but it is a compelling enough idea, that we arrange a social-order that approximates the shape of the concept.

All that really exists, are people. We are a species of primate, honed by millions of years of evolutionary activity into our present shape. This has happened due to emergent activity. Emergence theory attempts to describe the way that order happens in our universe. The reason order occurs, is simply because behaviors that self-replicate continue to persist.

Human beings tend to possess an anthropocentric world view. Our model of how the world works is based on our limited experience of physics, re-occurring phenomena, and childhood experiences. We see the world as being arranged like a pyramid, managed from the top down. By studying our world empirically, science has taught us that, in reality, the pyramid is inverted; it is not God who made man, but man who made God. It is not our benevolent leaders who give us a functioning orderly society, it is us, it is solely due to our choice of behaviors.

Emergent activity coalesced energy into matter, and matter into proteins, and proteins into rudimentary species. And we evolved from those species.

Human society can thus be seen as a progression of that same activity. Just as our bodies are simply a complex alignment of cells, which are in turn a complex alignment of proteins, society is a complex alignment of human cells, forming a much larger organism. Even now you are reading these words by use of the internet, a form of rudimentary nervous system.

Early human society was tribal. By unifying the interests and labor of members of our species, we could produce more resources, and thus self-replicate more effectively. We became so effective that our tribes began to grow beyond the scope of human conception. Dunbar's number is a supposed figure which describes the upper limit of how many people we can know, and still consider human. It's around 150-200 people, and even smaller cities are larger than this. At the point when our species became so numerous that we could no longer conceptualize each other as humans, we crossed a boundary, the boundary of what our evolution had structured us for.

Because our tribes became to effective, so prosperous, we had ample resources, and thus labor could be expended on activities not directly related to survival. Specialization of labor occurred, and gave us agriculture, technology, and art. It also gave us the state.

As human beings became more numerous, the old tribal order broke down, there were simply too many people for it to be relevant, as a result, the close knit ties of inter-reliance became undone. As we specialized, we lost connection with our tribesmen, a situation which defied the careful structure of our psychology. Without of close emotional ties of tribal life, we became emotionally insecure, and the reaction to this anxiety was the formation of the state. Because we could no longer directly influence the behavior of our fellow men, we appealed to an organization to do so for us. The state has always been an attempt to project parental authority onto society. There are "bad children" out there, we feel, and they must be disciplined.

Early states were commonly theocratic, centered around a man-god Agriculture demands a settled tribe, rather than a nomadic one, and the concept of ownership became tied to the land, thus the kingdom of the man-god was based on a geographic region.

Of course the early man-god states were completely unnecessary. Human beings are quite content to work and earn, and we order ourselves by choice of action, the state was always just a security device. False sureness against our fears, and a false unity in the face of our autonomy.

As society grew, technology progressed, allowing us to both swell in numbers, and improve our quality of life. This trend continued and continued, and as dissemination of ideas became easier through technology, the ridiculousness of the man-god state became increasingly obvious. States tend to be inefficient, they not only contribute nothing that the market cannot provide at lower cost, but also are a drag on the economy, sucking away a portion of the public wealth through taxation, and through taxation they can promote warfare, which would otherwise simply be too expensive to wage on the scale of state sponsored war.

The man-god states were supplanted by church-states or law-states, very often still theocratic, as even our state system remains. The state demands irrational belief, it could not occur without our belief in its necessity. Just as the man-god states evolved into church-states, the monarchic law-state became democracies. From the one to the many, out of force of necessity.

What did not change was the basic nature of the state; they have always compelled taxation, warfare, and have always been both compulsory, and tied to geography. As the tribes grew they developed their own codified behaviors and aesthetic, culture.

Now, here we are in the year 2009, and we still labor beneath the fantasy of the state, we still appeal to it as a means of providing order, there are more humans than ever, and we feel completely helpless to change or control the behavior of our fellow humans.

The essential nature of a state is this. We give a collective of human beings monopoly power, specifically, a monopoly on the right to define and enforce policy over a specific geographic region. Implicit in this monopoly, is the right to use violence as enforcement, as coercion, otherwise the laws would simply be toothless, un-enforceable, obeyed only in relation to their relevance to the individual.

The history of man tends to show a movement towards freedom. With each generation we become more productive, and raise our standard of living. The emotional security that economic stability provides means that parents have fewer anxieties to project onto their children through physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, and thus each generation becomes a little more humane, a little more sensitive, a little more intelligent, and a little more peaceful. Might there come a point where society is intelligent enough to see through the emotional security of the state, and recognize its inherent uselessness and corruption? It may well be.

The last century has been one of fascism. A profusion of fascist and totalitarian states came into being, seemingly as many cultures achieved the "intrusive" mode of child-rearing. People raised in the "intrusive" mode were rarely physically abused, but were controlled and manipulated by their parents, thus instilling the need for control and subversion in the child.  The United States has long been in the more advanced "socializing" mode, and is seeing the emergence of "helping" modes of child-rearing. Perhaps this generation of emotionally confident children, raised in an atmosphere of love and self-actualization will see what generations of others have seemingly ignored:

That when it comes down to it, there are no states, no market, no chaos, and no order, there are simply people, and it is our choice of behavior that makes everything what it is.

Posted by BlackMask on 04/14/09

The Fallacy of Protest

The planned tax day protests are a little disheartening to me, because I do not believe they will work, not only that, but I think they will have a deleterious effect.

The public is split into three segments, the liberals, the moderates, and the conservatives. Because ideology is entrenched in both the liberal and conservative segments, the exchange of ideas is negligible. The moderates are moderates precisely because they do not have a strong ideological opinion; they are unlikely to be swayed by the message.

Those who are on the left edge of the moderate segment will be pushed further towards liberalism when presented with a protest over taxation. Those on the right are already on board.

Ultimately, protests are a waste of effort, as the left has shown over the past several decades. Did the protest of the Iraq war stop it from occurring? Did our political work to stop the bail-outs?

What we need is real action, and I am afraid that the C4L is only focusing on political solutions to the promotion of freedom. We should not be hypocrites; we should promote our values through the free-market as well.

Action

"Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth."

-Mohandas Gandhi

We need to show our force of will through our actions, in a peaceful, non-violent, manner. Here are some ideas for evaluation.

The Conscientious objector movement

We should form a collective of those who refuse to participate in violence, either violence promoted by the state, or violence against the state. Beyond simply refusing to have our labor exploited toward the ends of destruction and murder, we must refuse to fund the cause of war.

We should withhold our taxes. This being April I am sure we are all well aware of the burden of taxation. It causes me, personally, great moral strife to pay taxes into a system which will seize my resources in order to build missiles and bombs to mangle and destroy individuals half way across the globe who have done me no harm, and with whom I have no quarrel. And I would not hesitate to suffer the consequences of withholding my resources, if only I felt that there was a greater movement supporting me. Such a movement must come into being. We must put our money where our mouth is, our wellbeing where our values are.

We need to organize a plan that any individual can follow to deprive the state of our resources. It must be simple to do and final, and because no one really wants to pay taxes, we might see a swell of support. The more people participate, the less the state can do about it. Finally we need to create a support system for those who the state retaliates against, so that the people can feel confident in standing up against state exploitation.

Free-market social service industry

We need to gather resources and create a free-market institution or institutions that can provide the public with utilitarian goods and services.

Food, water, clothing, housing, electricity, internet, art and lending are all baseline services the people need, and that we should work to provide through free-market businesses specifically founded on the principal of freedom, mutuality, and humanitarianism.

Products should be designed according to the cradle to cradle theory of design (waste equals food) so that they stand as a paragon of ecologically sound, and intuitive human design.

http://www.mbdc.com/c2c_home.htm

By focusing on the creation of jobs through intentional business planning (tempered by market necessity)a strong statement could be made for the free-market as a just venture capable not just of prosperity but of equality and stability.

In short, the free-market must be proven to be a sound foundation, and I believe this will be accomplished by focusing not on profit, but on the wellbeing of both the customer base and employees.

http://www.adbusters.org/ has already begun a program of "guerrilla capitalism" as a means of building brand free socially responsible products. Adbusters tends towards socialism and anti-consumerism, but they have a strong Anarchistic bent, and by working together liberals and conservatives can mediate their ideological excesses.

Most importantly there has to be a popular media outlet capable of embodying free-speech. The internet is great for disseminating ideas, but it lacks the sense of legitimacy that broadcast has. There is a huge untapped market for rational media. The popularity of spoof news programs such as The Daily Show and The Onion is proof that the public craves more rational interpretation of news.

Panarchism not Minarchism

The real flaw in central government is not government itself. A government is merely a collective of people, just like a business. The difference is in the operational nature of the collective. The flaw is not that government is inherently incompetent and thus unfit to intervene in the market (though that is surely the case).

The flaw in government, as society has implemented it in the past, is that it is an involuntary system. It is compulsory, and its authority is enforced by an essential threat of violence. If I disagree with the law on moral grounds I cannot withdraw my support and abstain from its jurisdiction. I will be punished, and if I attempt to avoid punishment I will be murdered.

No social order upheld by the threat of violence is legitimate, in my view.

So the flaw in government is that it is compulsory, and thus it has no impetus to change or evolve with societal evolution. The state will always be a barbarous relic, arbitrarily oppressing and harassing the citizenry who sustain it.

The solution to this problem is Panarchism rather than Minarchism. A Minarchistic government will always grow in power, as our American central government has.

Panarchic government, voluntary governance by contractual agreement, is government not of an arbitrary geographical region, but of an ideological region. Thus we could effectively influence both the liberals, conservatives, and moderates, all of these segments of the public could be served by their own, ideologically representative state systems. And because the states themselves are voluntary and contractual they would be forced to compete, like businesses, to best serve the citizenry.

Posted by BlackMask on 01/26/09

There is a great interview on todays episode of "Democracy Now".

http://www.democracynow.org/

What is great about it, is how David Korten calls out that the old economic dichotomy was, socialism versus capitalism.

centralized government ownership versus centralized private ownership.

What needs to come about is public ownership. The right of people to own the place they live, the things they produce, and the value that they create with their work.

It is centralized ownership of any kind that promotes injustice and exploitation, because the owners have no connection to what they own.

The soviet union is one of the most polluted places on earth, because no one owned anything personally there, and thus they had no personal responsibility or interest in their ecological health.

Conversely, when the world bank lends to a third world country in order to help them develop, then forces them to privatize their social systems, corporations with no interest in the well being of the local people buy up the resources, and then abuse the populace.

Ron Paul's argument for the free-market is not the promotion of capitalism, profit measured in abstract dollars, but in real value, the goods and commodities produced by individuals and traded freely.

This is an economic model which can be embraced by both the left and the right, because it promotes fairness through personal-responsibility.

Posted 01/26/09 constraint Columbus, IN

I think you may be confused. Public ownership would imply government ownership. Private ownership is when people own things for themselves. You're right about the personally responsibility issue in the USSR, but everything in the USSR was publicly owned. For example pulling from the wiki entry on the The Decree on Land: Written by Vladimir Lenin, was passed by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies on 26 October 1917, following the success of the October Revolution. It decreed an abolition of private property... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_on_Land Also you can see in Chapter 4 of "The Revolution" where Ron Paul states that the protection of private property rights is the best way to protect the environment.

Posted 01/27/09 BlackMask Eugene, OR

It's just a matter of semantics. I meant, ownership by the people. It's actually kind of funny because government is a sort of monopoly, just another kind of economic actor, much like a corporation. There's not really any difference between the "private" and "public" sector. My point was that economic centralization of any kind is hazardous and destructive.

Posted by BlackMask on 01/15/09

By that I mean of course, "Viva La Revolucion"

I think Jefferson would approve. But then, what do I know about a dead man's perspective?

A few words by way of introduction:

My father was a left-libertarian, and my mother was a liberal democrat.

By this alchemy was I bred, loving truth as well as compassion. Honor as well as peace. Freedom as well as justice. This dichotic nature defines me, and as I find truth to be a fusion of opposites, I know the Truth. But also I don't.

I come here bearing words to describe thoughts. Thoughts that attempt to illuminate the nature of reality, and thus the face of god, as he emerges out of the void.

I swear that my input won't be this cryptic most of the time.

Words by way of warning:

I may be fierce, but I hope I am not abusive. If I offend it is merely to shake dogmatic thinkers, and illicit more complex through processes. I do not mean harm.

Peace, prosperity, justice, and freedom be upon all of you, just as flesh, fat, sinew, and blood is to bones.

Posted 02/07/09 AlbertRichter Lancaster, NY

dear "black mask", I admire your enthusiasm and thank you for commenting on my blog entry. I can see we are in for a fun ride at campaign for liberty as we exchange ideas. I want to invite you to relax and enjoy the journey with us so we can be in the fight for the long haul together. Please edit your profile so we can get to know you for who you are. Best Regards, Albert Richter buffal, NY